Robot Web Tools: Efficient Messaging For Cloud Robotics

Since its official introduction in 2012, the Robot Web Tools project has grown tremendously as an opensource community, enabling new levels of interoperability and portability across heterogeneous robot systems, devices, and front-end user interfaces. At the heart of Robot Web Tools is the rosbridge protocol as a general means for messaging ROS topics in a client-server paradigm suitable for wide area networks, and human-robot interaction at a global scale through modern web browsers. Building from rosbridge, this paper describes our efforts with RobotWeb Tools to advance: 1) human-robot interaction through usable client and visualization libraries for more efficient development of front-end humanrobot interfaces, and 2) cloud robotics through more efficient methods of transporting high-bandwidth topics (e.g., kinematic transforms, image streams, and point clouds). We further discuss the significant impact of Robot Web Tools through a diverse set of use cases that showcase the importance of a generic messaging protocol and front-end development systems for human-robot interaction.